One of the most commonly overlooked issues with dental practices is the issue of how fast their website loads. This can have a significant impact on not only your SEO rankings but also be a serious inhibitor to the number of new patients who become aware of your practice.
In fact, slow loading websites cost businesses more than $10 million in lost revenue every single day! That’s why it’s essential to consult a dental marketing company to help you with your Dental website. Hip Agency will show you the best way to do dental marketing and how to implement it.
A visitor to your website expects it to load fast. When their pages take more than 3 seconds to load, they start to leave and go somewhere else. Around 50% of the users will click out in five seconds and the bounce rate increases by 10%. If you’re a dentist and want to ensure that you get referrals from your website then it’s important that you optimize for speed.
There’s a big difference in site speed between a site on a hosting account shared with other companies, and one hosted on a dedicated server. The latter type of website can experience a speed increase of up to 200% – 300% from shared hosting.
If that’s not enough reason to check into purchasing an advanced Web-Hosting package, then consider the cost of losing customers due to slow loading sites. In fact, customers are less likely to buy from an online seller whose site takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Your website needs to be fast and responsive for your dental practice. If not, your patients can experience all kinds of problems when using your website. From slow load times to the page freezing during the navigation process, or even worse, not taking you to the page at all. These are all problems that you need to address.
What Is Site or Page Speed?
Website speed is a metric that measures the number of seconds it takes to load a website. Tasked with this problem is a discipline called performance engineering or more commonly known as site speed optimization (SEO).
It’s recommended to have your site running at an optimal speed of two seconds or better. Two seconds is considered the threshold for eCommerce website acceptability. Three seconds is the threshold of what most people will tolerate before getting frustrated with a slow site.
What Is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Value of Site Speed?
Page load time is an SEO ranking factor. Site speed influences which search results are displayed on page one of Google. More importantly, over 50 percent of users say they will abandon a webpage that takes longer than three seconds to load unless it’s an eCommerce webpage. If you want your site to rank on the first page of Google, then reducing your time to content is important to increase conversions, sales, and traffic.
Site or page speed can make a difference in the level of engagement you have with your website visitors. If your website is slow to load, you can lose up to 66% of your visitors. In addition to that, the overall user experience could decline to lead to a decline in overall conversions. Losing these visitors could affect your organic rankings which will lead to a decline in overall traffic.
What Causes a Slow Website?
A slow website can be caused by several factors. The content contained on each of your site’s pages contributes to the speed with which it loads. Things such as images, videos, javascript files, HTML code, CSS that styles page elements, other multimedia such as music and more all take time to load and impact the loading speed. Understanding what is causing your website to load slowly gives you the opportunity to make adjustments where necessary resulting in a faster loading time.
A slow website may cause a higher bounce rate, less time-on-site, and a lower ranking among the pages on the top search engine result pages. This article will explore what you can do to speed up your website so continue reading on.
Why Is a Fast Site Important?
A fast website is important for a number of reasons. The main one is that your customers want easy, convenient service when it’s time to research and make a decision about their health care. Generally, we’re looking at around 30 seconds to a minute for Pages to Load – and then we’re looking at the Page Speed Report provided by Google. It’s incredibly useful and shows us where we should be focusing on speed improvements and making sure we get actionable data from it.
The speed at which your site loads directly impacts the success of your online presence. Roughly 50% of online shoppers will abandon their carts without checking out when they’re faced with loading speeds in excess of three to four seconds. Even more, telling is the fact that 46% of customers say that they won’t revisit a website that takes longer than three seconds to load!
Ways to Improve Your Website Speed
Controlling your site speed takes a combination of thinking about site speed, identifying elements that are slowing you down, and applying tricks to make your site fly. Another important factor is knowing if the person using the website has a slow connection. If this is the case, perhaps there is no need for you to be loading something as heavy as an image.
What works well for your site might not work for someone else’s, so here are some basic tricks about website speed optimization for you. Some of these may seem too small to mention but remember that every byte counts.
Here are some pointers to remember for a faster website:
Fix your server- Web hosting affects speed a lot
Cut back on the number of images you use -Optimize your site’s images
Use a load balancing system to ensure extra-fast browsing-Review what slows down the site the most and Remove items slowing down the website
Takeaway
Improving your website speed is one of the most important areas to focus on if you want to be competitive online. Along with SEO and creating great content, creating a fast and reliable website is vital to increasing engagement and conversion.
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